In AtlasJennifer Lopez plays a counterterrorism analyst who lives for her work – you know what kind of woman she is. Atlas Shepherd is a woman who alienates her co-workers with her laconic attitude and then impresses them with her competence, who falls asleep on the couch in front of her chessboard at night, and who ties her hair into a businesslike twist so she can let it down later. When a rare trip into the field goes wrong, she ends up stranded in hostile territory in the care of Smith, a hulking military type who is tasked with protecting her, and with whom she immediately begins arguing about the best way to return home. In a romantic comedy version of this story, Smith would be played by John Cena or Channing Tatum, all muscle and knowledge of advanced weapons hiding a sensitive core. Directed by Brad Peyton Atlas However, this is a science fiction movie, and Smith is a robot. Most notably, he’s a mecha suit, piloted by a synthetic consciousness voiced by Gregory James Kohan, into whose pilot seat the anti-AI Atlas is pushed just before it crashes on an alien planet.
So then, if His If this film is so ambitious that companies are willing to take the legal risks for it, then there is no reason to make this new film. can’t It can be seen as a romantic comedy. Atlas It has that peculiar quality of many Netflix original films, where it feels like an extended version of a film 30 Rock It’s a joke rather than something worth watching for anyone, but its cross-genre similarities seem deliberate. For instance, when trying to allow Smith to get to know her better, she confesses to liking the beach, three sugars in her coffee, and “small, quiet gestures of affection.” Atlas is as cautious as she is supposed to be smart, but she’s written exactly like those 2000s heroines who have to go through hardships and shrink down to size before they’re even considered worthy of love. When she runs into Smith after a brutal arrival, she impatiently bypasses the set-up and makes her way to a French language option before ending up with a default voice, whose recommendations she promptly ignores.
Three decades ago, an android named Harlan (Simu Liu with blue contact lenses) went rogue and waged war on humanity before escaping into space with his comrades. Atlas is obsessed with catching him, for reasons that gradually get very personal. But to access all of her mech’s capabilities, she needs to sync her mind with Smith’s, a match they struggle to achieve, and it’s not because of her performance issues. Haunted by trauma going back to her childhood, she’s so emotionally constipated that she can’t open up enough to seal the deal.
Following Lopez’s acting career is an exercise in frustration. out of sight And The HustlersShe’s brimming with charisma — a true star, larger than life, doubly glamorous and endlessly watchable. But most of the roles she takes on don’t reflect those qualities, if they even show them. She’s slipped from romantic comedy queen to procedural role and then to hesitation as she turns to action, but in projects that consistently feel underwhelming and underutilized for her proven potential. Atlas — like her last Netflix movie MotherLike shotgun wedding And marry me — a film she produced as well as starred in, shows that even as she becomes more actively involved in choosing projects for herself, she’s still not entirely sure what she wants to do onscreen. She oscillates between playing her character with a degree of psychological realism, twitching her lips in frustration as she tries in vain to contact her co-workers, and going completely insane as she screams at Smith. Lopez seems unable to decide whether she wants to play her character or not. Atlas is a serious entry in the action canon or B-movie.
Atlas In fact it’s neither, it’s neither that far removed from seriousness nor is it lacking in any of the irreverent fun you might expect in a B-movie. Atlas It has the smooth, textureless sheen of a video game cutscene we never get to play, a juxtaposition on which the film doubles down when Atlas looks through the pages of Smith’s weapons catalog. Lopez, who spends half the film as a face surrounded by machinery, looks lost in a sea of computer graphics, something that’s even more true for her co-stars Liu and Sterling K. Brown, who plays mission head Colonel Elias Banks. When, not too long from now, Netflix starts serving up personalized AI-generated sludge content based on each of our viewing histories, it probably won’t look much different than it already does. AtlasWhich anyway doesn’t look like it was made by humans at all. But the point is that Atlas Its purpose isn’t to magnify its agents – it’s to remind us that AI is our friend, even when it sometimes tries to destroy us, and that we should get over ourselves and our own petulant objections.
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